ABSTRACT
Indispensable as it may have become to a British historical consciousness, ihis is an understanding of the relation between union and empire whose historical supports are fast dissolving. The predicament in which England and Scotland found themselves in the seventeenth century, sharing the same monarch, was by no means as anomalous as the conventional account would suppose. On the contrary, historians now suggest, Composite' monarchy was the European norm: almost every ruling dynasty of consequence - Habsburg, Bourbon and Vasa as well as Stuart - had acquired multiple titles, and exercised authority over a number of territories, which might not even be contiguous.2 The potential advantages of closer unity between their territories were, moreover, well known to these rulers: over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there were many examples of the imposition or negotiation of more formal unions.3 The belief that the British problem was exceptional, and that its solution, a negotiated union, was unique, can no longer be sustained. The Union of 1707 belongs within a European setting, and should be thought of as the British variant of a wider pattern.4
